by john | Apr 19, 2018 | Fiction, Harker
Since She Talks to Angels releases today, I thought I’d give you all a sneak peek into the opening of the book, kinda like a tease to get you to go out and buy that shit. Here’s the linky to aforementioned shit.
Chapter 1
“Not a good time, Harker,” I said into my cell phone as I put the Toaster in park. My beat up old Honda Element isn’t sexy, but it’s paid for and has all the cargo room I need for my day job. That day job at the moment had me stashing my panty-dropping grocery grabber at the far end of a parking lot across from The Last Ride, a biker bar on the outskirts of St. Louis. The preferred modes of transportation for the occupants of the bar apparently had at least one, usually two fewer wheels than my Element, but there were a couple of old Detroit-made penis compensation methods in the gravel lot as well. Still, I thought I’d be better off leaving my sensible sport utility vehicle parked away from all the testosterone. By the looks of the place, my car would get chlamydia if it got too close.
“I don’t really care, Gabby. This is important,” the self-important prick known as Quincy Harker said from my phone. I don’t like Harker. I don’t like the fact that he lied to me to get me to help him on our first case together (admittedly I mean more “not shoot him” than actually help). I don’t like the fact that he spends the majority of his time with Dracula, the monster my great-grandfather famously hunted and thought he killed. I don’t like that he seems to know a lot more about Grandpa Abe than I do, having actually met the old man when he was a little kid. And I really don’t like that he and his little merry band of assholes called The Shadow Council keep talking me into doing shit that goes directly against my best interests, like getting in the middle of a goddamned demon invasion in Georgia, of all godforsaken places.
Fuck Georgia. I’m a Midwest girl, through and through. I like St. Louis. I like Chicago. I even like Detroit, and nobody likes Detroit. So even six months later, I was still irritated at Harker for getting me wrapped up in some bullshit save the world scheme in Atlanta last year.
“So is me getting paid, Harker. Some of us have jobs, remember? We can’t all live off the riches our parasitic uncles have stashed all over the world.”
“You know there’s a stipend available for all Council members, right?”
I felt my eyes widen at his slightly distorted words. I took the phone off speaker and brought it to my ear. “No. That wasn’t part of the friggin’ welcome packet, you prick.” Did this asshole mean to tell me that I’d been living on ramen and shitty bail jumper gigs for almost two years since he fucked my deal with Homeland Security?
“Oh, sorry about that. Must have slipped my mind. We can have all your back pay deposited into your account this afternoon. Now can I tell you about Lucifer?”
“No,” I said. “We are not done with me bitching at you yet. You think you can just kill my contact at Homeland Security, get my monster-hunting contract with the government cancelled, and I’ll forgive you just because you wave a fistful of singles under my nose like I’m some dancer at your favorite topless bar?”
“One, I don’t go to strip clubs anymore. My fiancée doesn’t approve. Two, you didn’t even know Smith was your contact until he was dead and your contract got cancelled. And three, the stipend is a little more than a fistful of singles.” Harker named a figure, and I got quiet. That was a big fistful of money.
“Is that the two years I’m owed in back pay?” I asked, swallowing hard.
“No, Gabriella, that is your annual stipend. So you’re owed double that. Like I said, I’ll have Dennis deposit the money this afternoon. Now can I get you to focus on the important things, like saving the world?”
I put the phone back on speaker and set it in the cupholder. I leaned back, keeping an eye on the front door of the bar. My intel said that the skip was inside and unlikely to leave until daylight, so I wasn’t in much of a rush. “Got ahead, Harker. Spill it. What’s so damned important? I thought we were just hunting down your hottie angel’s wings.”
“Yeah, it got more complicated,” he said. “Lucifer is involved, and he’s taken Uriel, one of the other Archangels, to Hell. If he kills Uriel while they’re on a divine plane, he can take up Uriel’s mantle and become an Archangel again. Then Lucifer will be able to get back into Heaven at will. I’m guessing you can see how that ends poorly for most of the known universe.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t sound good. So are we off of Operation Wingy-Dingy now and back on the Save the World train?” I asked.
“Not yet. We need to figure out how to get to Hell—”
“I’ve told you to go to hell a lot. You should have listened.”
“Funny. Anyway, Luke and Dennis, along with Sealtiel, are trying to figure out how to get us across the planar divide without the requisite dying. Until they get that figured out, we’re still working on the idea that the more Archangels we have at our side when we storm the Gates of Hell, the better.”
“Makes sense. I’ll get right on finding Ragu as soon as I’m done here.”
“Raguel,” Harker corrected.
“Gesundheit.” I hung up the phone, laughing. It was petty, and I knew it, but he was just an infuriating son of a bitch. He had it all—looks, sexy British accent, and a girlfriend that I would just love to get alone for an hour or ten. I shoved the thoughts of Harker and his hottie aside and refocused on the target at hand.
I swiped and tapped at my phone for a couple seconds, and a picture appeared. James Monroe “Blackheart” Burris was a big guy, six-three according to his mug shot, with a dark ponytail showing a little gray and a salt-and-pepper goatee. Tattoos all over his arms and creeping up from under his shirt to peek out under the neck of his t-shirt. According to my surveillance, he favored black t-shirts, often with a Harley logo, jeans, engineer boots, a chain wallet, and a leather jacket with his Sons of Hell cut on the back of it.
You know, just the kind of guy you want to take home to mama. If mama was a psychopath. I swiped across the screen, and my motivation for this job popped up on the screen. Taneisha Cooper Burris, estranged wife of the asshole currently sitting in a biker bar with his hand on a twenty-year-old waitress’s ass while Taneisha sat home worrying about losing her condo if this dickhole failed to appear in court in three days. In Chicago. In Illinois, where Blackheart Burris was supposed to remain until such time as he faced trial for armed robbery according to the terms of his bail.
So while his wife worked two jobs to keep his four-year-old daughter clothed and fed, Blackheart yukked it up across state lines with some of his Sons of Hell buddies from another chapter. He’d been hanging around St. Louis for about a week before I caught wind of him, and I’d had eyes on the clubhouse for a couple days now. It was your typical biker bar—dingy, well-armed, shitload of David Allen Coe on the jukebox, and next to no police presence in the surrounding blocks.
I got out of the Toaster and walked around to the back doors. Pulling them open, I flipped the back seats down, yanked the headrests off, and lifted the inside edge of each seat, then hooked it to the wall. That turned the back of the Element into essentially a small panel van. I opened the tool box I had bolted to the floor and took out my Sig Sauer P320. I clipped the holster to the inside of my jeans and slipped the pistol home in the front of my jeans. I pulled on a loose black hoodie, dropped the front of the sweatshirt down over the butt of the gun, and grabbed two pair of zip cuffs out of the box. Not for the first time, I wondered how badly my little toy box would be received in a traffic stop and vowed to obey more speed limits and road signs in the future.
I closed the doors of the Toaster, took my hair down out of the ponytail I usually wore, and used my reflection in the rear windows of the car to slut up my lipstick and poof my hair a little. I thanked Eema for the thick black hair her Romany heritage blessed me with and put a lot more strut into my walk than normal, then headed toward the front door of the club.
I was halfway there when I realized I’d left my phone sitting in the cupholder. Oh well, it’s not like there was anybody I could call to bail my ass out if I got in over my head anyway. Just another day in the glamorous life of Gabriella Van Helsing, great-granddaughter of the most famous vampire hunter in history, now reduced to chasing down bail jumpers in shitty bars in Missouri. But hey, on my off days, I got to save the world with a bunch of weirdos and monsters. Yay.
The no-neck imbecile at the door didn’t even pat me down, just looked down my hoodie at the cleavage on display and waved me in. It’s not even like I was wearing anything sexy, just a scoop-neck t-shirt. But men are stupid. I might as well use that stupid to my advantage.
Aforementioned stupid was on display at its finest in the bar, which boasted not only dim lights, thick smoke, and loud music, but also a pair of behemoths arm-wrestling, two stick-thin girls weaving between pinching fingers to deliver drinks, and a giant bald guy behind the bar glaring at everyone and everything. Why is the guy behind the bar always pissed off? It’s not like he gets hit in the inevitable fights, he’s got bar to hide behind. I sauntered over to the bar, making sure to get my hips rocking from side to side as I strutted across the sticky floor, and I leaned my hoodie-clad elbows on the damp wood.
“How about a shot?” I asked, giving him my best “come hither” look.
He responded with a scowl. “What you want?”
“Let’s try something fun. How about a red-headed slut?” I gave him a smile usually guaranteed to get me at least a couple of phone numbers, if not a free drink or three.
He didn’t return the smile. If anything, his scowl deepened. “All our sluts are brunettes. You want Jack or Jim?” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the limited booze selection.
“How about Wild Turkey? I’m feeling like bourbon. Wanna feel?”
Still nothing. Not even a crack of a smile. Damn, that one even gets me a laugh at gay bars where all the boys are prettier than me, but this guy was not interested. He poured me a shot of bourbon, and I knocked it back, feeling the brown liquor burn all the way down. I turned the glass upside down on the bar and looked at CueBall. “Another. This one on the rocks.”
Then I turned around and looked around the rest of the bar, trying to zero in on my quarry. I found him easy enough, sitting at a table with his back to a wall and a blond piece of jailbait on his lap. The remains of most of a case of beer littered the floor around his table, and he and a pair of other goons passed a joint around the table right under a No Smoking sign. Everything pointed to a pretty rocking poker game in progress, and every time Burris dragged a pile of chips back to his side of the table, he slipped one into the brassiere of the girl on this lap. After a run of particularly good hands, the married bail jumper whose wife was about to lose her house because of his unauthorized travel plans spun the girl on his lap around and spent a good minute and a half using his tongue to check the health of her tonsils.
Yeah, this guy was going to get an ass-kicking. I sipped my bourbon and watched my quarry until I was down to ice cubes, then I reached behind me to set my glass down and go get my jumper. That’s when the bartender grabbed my wrist and leaned over. “You’re about to make a big mistake, little girl.”
I really hate being called “girl.” Shit was about to get real.
Did you dig it? Do you want more? Buy it here! Hell, you can even read the whole thing for free if you’ve got Kindle Unlimited! Want to read this and everything else I release early? Or on a non-kindle ebook platform? Join my Patreon and get pre-release copies in whatever format you like!
by john | Sep 20, 2017 | How to Sell Books, Promos/Giveaways
I wrote a couple of posts early in this series about how to build a mailing list with Incentivized and Organic Subscribers, and all that stuff remains true. If you missed them, the first part is here, and the second one is here. This won’t be about the philosophical elements of making a newsletter, this will be about the nuts and bolts, the mechanics, and what I personally do with my mailing lists to monetize them. Some of this is stuff I’ve gleaned from the internet, some of it I’ve come up with on my own, and fair chunk of it is from notes I took in a long conversation with my friend Stuart Jaffe. If you want to read some kickass adventure or supernatural mystery stuff, check him out. And if you sign up for his email list, you’ll get some free shit! Eric Asher is another person I use for a resource on promos and mailing lists, and he’s also got a deal or two running right now.
But how do I deal with my mailing list(s)? Well, that’s been the subject of a lot of thought over the past few days, as I’ve recently relocated my mailing list from Mailchimp to Mailerlite, because for the number of subscribers that I have (currently about 3,600 across four lists) Mailerlite is $20/month, where Mailchimp was $50, and going to $75 when I reach 5K. So that’s not an insignificant savings, especially given what I have in the marketing budget most months, which is frequently dryer lint. By the way, if you click on those links and sign up for Mailerlite, you get a discount and I get a kickback, so if this is helpful, that’s one way to show the love.
As I mentioned, I have four mailing lists, three of which are active, and one I’m just getting moving (slowly) on. The lists are – my newsletter, the Falstaff Books newsletter, and the ARC team for me & Falstaff. Yes, those links are the signup forms for the linked newsletters. Yes, you can get a metric ton of free ebooks just for signing up to all of those email lists and then auto-dropping. I mean, by my rough reckoning, if you signed up for all the lists that I’ve shown you here, you would get six complete novels, two short stories, one sampler anthology, and one anthology. All for free!
But how does it work? How do I get people onto the lists, and how do I deal with the lists once I’ve got them there. Okay, here’s what I do. It’s more than most people, and scale it back to fit your productivity, but remember that I release at least one new product every month, and sometimes more, plus I have a publishing company releasing at least two new books each month, usually more. So I have a lot of shit to notify people about. But here’s the plan.
1) Consistency – I’m a flake, and anyone that has worked with me knows it. I know it, and I also know that I can’t do the things I need to do if I’m flaking out all over the place. So I have an event set up in my calendar to write a newsletter every Wednesday. It’s also when I write these posts, so it kinda just gives me a couple hours in publisher headspace to do this kind of stuff. I do a John Hartness newsletter one week, then a Falstaff newsletter the following week. If for some reason I don’t have anything new coming out that week, the week before, or the week after, I skip a week. That doesn’t happen very often, between appearances, book releases, and audiobook releases, I have something hitting the virtual streets almost every week, so there’s something to talk about. But consistency is critical. If you go too long without sending out a newsletter, people forget about you. And obscurity is our enemy. So I send out a newsletter about every two weeks for each of my major newsletters. The ARC team is a whole different story, and one that I’m still working on. I’ll keep you posted.
2) The Funnel – This is what I learned from Stuart, setting up my automation. I know he didn’t invent the idea. He’s smart, but not that smart. But he was kind enough to take the time to sit down and explain the whole thing to me. So here’s what happens when someone signs up for my email newsletter, and this is another place in which Mailerlite has Mailchimp beat, hands down. This shit was so much easier to set up on Mailerlite that it wasn’t even funny.
Step 1 – Janet signs up for the newsletter. Janet gets a confirmation email with a link in it directing her to confirm that she’s a human and really wanted to sign up for this crap. Once she does that, she is sent to an Instafreebie page. Instafreebie is a website that automates ebook giveaways and integrates them with mailing lists. It lets me do all this without actually having to sit down and send people ebooks. I use it for all my mailing list giveaways. Yes, there is a referral link buried in that link, too, so if you sign up for Instafreebie and upload a book, I get a discount. Just assume that I have put referral links in every link in here, because I probably have. It doesn’t add anything to your cost, and if I am recommending that you sign up for a service, might as well get them to pay me for it, right?
Step 2 – But anyway, Janet goes to Instafreebie and gets her free ebook. Then the automation starts rolling. In a few days, Janet will get a second email, with another Instafreebie link, this one to a different free short story. She doesn’t have to sign up for anything extra, she doesn’t have to get the story. But it’s free, and it’s a story I like, so why not give it away?
Step 3 – Seven days later, Mailerlite runs an if/then sequence. If Janet opened the email, then she gets an email inviting her to join the Falstaff Books email list. This will get her two more free ebooks, plus another set of notifications. If she didn’t open the email, it will resend, to give her a little reminder to become an active fan and read all my shit (and get more free shit!).
Step 4 – Seven days after that, another step runs. If Janet didn’t open the email a second time, she’s removed from the list. I pay per subscriber, and if people aren’t reading the things I’m sending, then I would rather not pay to keep them around. If they are actively interested and just got busy, they can sign up again and get more free shit all over again. If Janet opened the email the second time it sent, she then gets invited to the Falstaff Books email list. To get more free shit. If she opened the Falstaff Books invite, then she gets another email inviting her to join Stuart’s email list and get his shit for free. Because we all like to work together, and a rising tide lifts all boats. So the more books Stuart sells, the more books I will eventually sell, because we’re all about training people to buy indie and small press books, and love us all. So I like pimping my friends.
If Janet didn’t open the Falstaff Books email, then nothing else happens. I don’t refer only moderately active subscribers to other folks, but I don’t boot them, either. If they’ve opened 2/3 of the emails I send, then I definitely want them around.
That’s the way my funnel is currently set up, and it’s constantly evolving. But I want to draw people in as much as I can, and engage them as much as I can. Those are the initial steps to building a list, signup forms, and creating a funnel to suck them into your loving arms forever.
We’re way over the thousand word limit I try to keep these at, but just a quick note – there’s a new Quincy Harker short story coming out soon, and I’m giving away 100 copies on Instafreebie. You don’t have to sign up for shit, just click this link and you can get a free Harker story. Now, you CAN sign up for the email list while you’re there, but it’s not required. There are 80 or so available as of this writing, so go get some free shit!
by john | Apr 4, 2017 | Promos/Giveaways, Writing
I have a bunch of stuff coming out in the next couple months, and I’m fortunate enough to have an amazing cover artist, Natania Barron, working on them. She’s already got the covers knocked out for the next Quincy Harker book, which will be out this month sometime, the next Shadow Council book, which will hit e-stores next month, and a brand new standalone project that’s coming later in the spring.
First up, here’s the cover for Devil Inside, the next Quincy Harker novella. Devil Inside continues the 8-book crossover event that I’m tentatively calling Quest for Glory. If anyone comes up with a better name, I’m all for it.
In this story, Harker is dealing with some of the fallout from Season 2, then moves on to hunting down the first of the Implements of the Archangels that he has to find. His quest takes him to Charleston, SC, and of course it isn’t as easy as he hoped.
He has to deal with the city’s mystical guardians, who aren’t very trusting of a random new wizard in town, plus a sorcerer who wants to sink the city beneath the ocean, AND he has to find a magical book and his best hope lies in a dotty shopkeeper that speaks only in Shakespeare quotes.
Life can get tough when you’re the Reaper.
Angel Dance is the next episode in Quest for Glory, and I’m currently writing this one. This novella features Adam, Frankenstein’s monster, in New Orleans looking for the Horn of the Herald. The Horn was played by the Archangel Sealtiel in the War on Heaven, and it’s now lost in a sea of musical instruments in one of the greatest cities for music in the world. Needle, meet haystack.
And of course that can’t be the only thing going on, so Adam has to deal with the fact that someone or something is hunting down practitioners of magic in the Crescent City and murdering them, including one of Adam’s few friends. He doesn’t like it when people hurt his friends.
Don’t make him angry. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry. For real, folks, he’s friggin’ Frankenstein’s monster, why would you piss him off?
Fireheart is a bit of a departure for me. One, it’s a full-length novel, and y’all know I don’t write that many of those. Two, it’s more of a YA thing than a snarky adult thing, which was a fun changeup to write. And three, it’s a standalone rather than part of a series, so this book is all you get with these characters. It’s something I’ve had kicking around for a while, and I finally dragged it out, finished it, and polished it up. It oughta be out late spring.
In Fireheart, a mountaintop removal mining operation wakes up a sleeping dragon. That’s not a euphemism, they really wake up a damn dragon. Of course, the dragon has been asleep for a few hundred years, and he’s pretty grumpy when his alarm goes off. Rachel Hampton’s father is one of the head geologists at the mine, and he’s injured in the attack.
Rachel’s life is complicated enough with her best friend crushing on her and the cute boy she ran into on her bike (literally!). Then she’s riding through the woods and sees this really cute guy standing in the woods. Butt naked. With golden skin. Because dragons don’t always wear their scales.
So there’s a love triangle. And a dragon. And black helicopters. Because why wouldn’t there be black helicopters?
That’s a little news on the latest upcoming releases. As always, you can join my email list to find out about all this stuff, too! There’s a link over on the side of the page.
by john | Feb 22, 2017 | Business of publishing, Harker, Promos/Giveaways, Writing
Did I mention that there’s a new Quincy Harker book coming out Friday? Because there is, but it’s not a normal Harker book. In fact, everybody’s favorite demon hunter only makes one appearance in this book, and that’s by voicemail.
You see, Harker Year 3 is a huge crossover with my new series, The Shadow Council Case Files, and those two series tie together to make an 8-novella cycle called Quest for Glory. There will be four Shadow Council books, and four Harker books, and they all work together to tell the story of the team’s hunt for the archangels and the quest to get Glory her wings back, and thus restore her divinity.
The story kicks off in Calling All Angels, which features Joanna Harrison, who goes by the moniker of Jo Henry when she’s slamming a hammer into the face of demons and other baddies. She’s looking for Archangel Michael, and when she finds him, she quickly realizes that her troubles are just getting started!
This book follows immediately after Heaven Can Wait, and will be followed by the next Harker novella, Devil Inside, which should release on or before April 1.
You can pre-order it on Amazon today, and me and the cat will thank you for it!
